HRM624 Conflict Management Assignment 2 solution Spring 2013

Case:
Ms. Shagufta Khan has completed her MPhil in Physics from a renowned university. Prior to that, she has obtained two post-graduate degrees: one in mathematics and one in physics. In the recent job interview in a science and technology firm, she was a candidate along with 10 other individuals. It was a desk cum field job. She was clearly the most qualified among all candidates and was paralleled by only one of the candidates, named Ahmed Rafiq, who had also done MPhil.
Though Ms. Shagufta had secured better grades than Mr. Ahmed, and possessed more experience, she was not selected for the job. The interview panel argued that a male candidate was more suitable for the job because women do not possess the required aptitude for the subject; and moreover, women are too fragile to work in the field. The panel told her that if it were a completely office based job, they would have preferred Shagufta but they were convinced that Ahmed was the right candidate for the filed job.
REQUIREMENT:
Q1. What are the factors that lead to this decision? What is the reason behind specified gender roles and stereotyped gender aptitudes? (10 Marks)

Solution: Gender affects and indeed permeates, conflict dynamics at the societal and individual level. Understanding the role of gender in conflict is best accomplished through an analysis of individual levels, interactional levels and the societal level.

Within these three levels of analysis there are also two radically different gender paradigms that direct the research agendas of social scientists working in this area.

The essentialist paradigm assumes a separate female world, one in which women are by nature different from men. In this view women are by nature so completely different from men that we experience a different reality. This perspective focuses on women’s caring, cooperative, and peaceful attributes. Some of these studies focus on women’s maternal abilities as shapers of our roles as caretakers and peacemakers.

The other paradigm denies the assumptions that women and men have essential natures. As a matter of fact, it denies the essential nature of anything. Post-modern feminism focuses on the exchange between the social construction of individuals and the individual’s constitution of themselves. By focusing on language, symbols, alternative discourses, and meaning, post-modern feminism studies how social power is exercised and how social relations of gender, class and race can be transformed. This doesn’t rule out the specificity of women’s experiences, and their differences from men, since under patriarchy women have differential access to the discursive field.

At the societal level, patriarchy is characterized by historic discrimination and injustice reproduced in institutions and ideologies. Assumptions about male superiority pervade our thought processes. The life experiences on which the claims of the dominant ideologies have been founded have been the experiences of men, not women. Patriarchy, like other dictatorships, controls reality. Women and men are socialized within rigid gender expectations. Institutions such as the church, the family, and the law reproduce these biases in norms, rules and laws. Women have historically been subjugated politically, economically and culturally. This institutional system of oppression and injustice directly creates disputes, sustains and escalates other conflicts and invades all other human interactions.

At the interactional level there are a number of studies. Gender may surface in conflicts in the ways that parties interpret and give meaning to the conflict. Patricia Gwartney-Gibbs studied how gender affects the origins, processes and outcomes of disputes in the workplace. Gwartney-Gibbs’ research found differences in the origins of disputes for men and women. The social construction of the workplace conditions the way that women formulate their grievances and the ways that supervisors translate them. Although both men and women had problems in the workplace which were associated with interpersonal relations, women reported more personality conflicts than men and seemed more sensitive to them. Women also experienced more conflicts over gender role stereotypes. Gender role stereotypes cause problems if the stereotype has little to do with the requirements of the job.

Gender also affected dispute handling mechanisms. The processes used to resolve disputes for women were less effective than for men. For example, women were more often transferred laterally instead of resolving the dispute.

The outcomes of the processes were also different for men than for women. Women’s disputes seldom were framed as falling within the contract so they received more individual responses to their disputes. Since women were more often transferred laterally, there was a direct impact on women’s earnings in the workplace. This research project shows that women experience different disputes in the workplace, their disputes are handled differently from men’s and the outcomes are different for the two groups. This study is important because it directly correlates the gender differences in workplace dispute origins, processes and outcomes to patterns in employment inequality.

Looking at the institutions of dispute handling, Terrell Northrup and Marshall Segall compared men and women’s experiences with community mediation. Their study analyzed differences in women and men’s feelings of vulnerability and empowerment. The researchers hypothesized that women feel vulnerable in day-to day relations, especially with men. Women’s sense of vulnerability would be particularly salient in conflict situations since there is a potential for aggression and violence.

The researchers found that women more often reported feeling scared or vulnerable than did men. Women were significantly more likely to feel vulnerable in conflicts with men than in conflicts with other women. Women were more likely to talk about being afraid of normal conflict and of being the victim of aggression or violence. Women reported that concerns about children, identity and status contributed to their vulnerability in conflicts. Lack of support from significant others and lack of trust in the other party also reinforced feelings of vulnerability.

Women and men also differed in the ways that they talked about their conflicts. Women talked in-depth and at length about the context of the dispute, particularly focusing on their involvement in the relationship with the other party. Men used more rational, linear and legalistic language to talk about their disputes. Women talked about fairness in a way that incorporated both their material interests and the network of relationships in the dispute.

Contrary to what the researchers expected, the women in the study used significantly more strategies and more kinds of strategies to resolve conflicts than did men. Also unexpectedly, women were no more concerned than were men with maintaining a positive relationship with the other party. Finally, women were as concerned with resolving the particular issue as were men.

While women felt more vulnerable, their vulnerability did not seem to interfere with their ability to actively handle their disputes. However, women talked at length about feeling disempowered and disadvantaged in attempting to deal with their conflicts. Northrup focuses on how men and women’s essentially different realities may lead us to understand conflict differently and therefore to approach conflict resolution differently.